The Beatles are back! Or, at least, a belated song based on a never-released John Lennon cassette demo that has been created through the wizardry of digital technology and the input of the band’s surviving members.
“Now and Then” was recorded by Lennon in his Manhattan apartment during the late 1970s. In 1994, his widow Yoko Ono gave the cassette with “Now and Then” and two other Lennon tunes, “Free as a Bird” and “Real Love.” Lennon’s bandmates Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr reunited to create Beatles singles using Lennon’s vocals on “Free as a Bird” and “Real Love,” but “Now and Then” was problematic because Lennon accompanied himself on a piano for that demo and it was impossible to separate his voice from the piano’s intrusive music.
Fast-forward to 2022 and Peter Jackson, who completed the “Get Back” renovation of “Let It Be,” devised the technology to isolate Lennon’s “Now and Then” vocals. McCartney and Starr recorded bass and drums, respectively, and a string orchestra was hired to fill in the recording. Harrison died in 2001, but recordings of his input from the previous sessions were included.
Billed as the last Beatles song, “Now and Then” – both as a song and in this short documentary – offers a post-script to a band that never went out of favor. The film on the song’s creation only offers hints of the finished product – the film went online a day before the song dropped – and it provides a jolly mix of clips of the Beatles over the decades as they come together (no pun intended) for one last hurrah, albeit as a digital jigsaw puzzle rather than a four-man collaboration.